Fredric Jameson once pointed out that the Marxist tradition is already our Antiquity due to its significance and historical distance. This distance allows us to view it from the outside, and to reinvent Marxism for our own time. The same could be said about the most paradoxical version of this tradition—Soviet Marxism. However, there are particular qualities that single it out from the "classical antiquity" of Marxist tradition. Even internationally known Soviet works (by Vygotsky, Bakhtin, amongst ­others) are not perceived as belonging to a unitary theoretical tradition, and are even less associated with Marxism and the heritage of 1917.It may therefore seem that the October Revolution of 1917, although being recognized as the key event of the "short twentieth century," has not created a universally recognizable and consolidated body of thought. It is, therefore, a difficult task to outline this field, and this is why the current lens of historical distance might be helpful in attempting to grasp both this unity and the richness of its internal differentiations.

Stasis is a peer-reviewed academic journal in social and political theory, which is jointly edited by a group of intellectuals from Eastern, Central, and Northern Europe. The Journal is published by the European University at Saint-Petersburg. Stasis is a bilingual journal that publishes articles in English and in other languages from the region. Stasis accepts for publication articles both in English and in the languages of the region. In the case of acceptance, the articles originally written in other languages are translated into English. Unlike many academic journals, Stasis is conceived as a cooperative project where the international board is not a consultative body but a collective editor.

The title, Stasis, means at once a particular position, an interrupting suspension, and an uprising. The journal thus represents an excentric and estranged standpoint which considers things and events while always holding in view the possibility of revolutionizing them. Far from defending a stagnation, Stasis thus suggests a sudden interruption of the hectic inertial motion, in a move of reflection and contestation.